About Me

I am a theatrical costume cutter/tailor at North America's largest repertory theatre. I've been working in the theatre since 1986, and have the privelege of working with many of the top-notch designers in Canada, the US and the UK. These include Desmond Heeley, Ann Curtis, Santo Loquasto, Patrick Clark, Christina Poddubiuk, John Pennoyer, Charlotte Dean, Susan Benson, Meredith Caron, Dany Lyne, Francois St.Aubin, Paul Tazewell, Jonathan Fensom, Debra Hanson among many others.

Thursday, July 14, 2011

warning: trim ahead

Remember the post here of the toile 18th century coat? Well here it is in progress. The trim has been chosen and we've laid it out and stitched most of it on by machine. Then we stopped.

We have two of these coats to do, identical trimming, so this one is waiting for a pair of hands to come free to continue with it, and in the meantime we are working hard to get the second coat to the same stage. We're working on the best spacing for the buttons in the picture above. The narrow braided trim was a pain to work with as it separated easily, and was quite thick, so it went on with a zig zag stitch down the middle.

That trim also shrunk- a lot- 15cm per metre, so the moral of the story is don't just measure the trim and tell the design team that 40 metres is enough, preshrink it before measuring! Luckily, they purchased more and we were saved .

The wavy gold trim was nice and flat but the designer wanted the scalloped edges to hand over the front edge and hemline of the coat. So, we stitched the inside edge down along the scallops, and left the other edge free for now so we can attach the facing and turn the hem first. When that is done, we can finish stitching the trim edge. We also have to put the shoulders together in order to finish the trim along the neckline, so we have a fair bit of work to do on this before it is wearable.

Everything has trim on it and here's a snapshot of figuring out the the cuff detail of the coat of beaded silk.

I recut the sleeves in the beaded fabric, mocked up the cuff and Denise got the coat ready with the beaded fabric so the designer could have a look at all the proportions and give us the go ahead.

We discovered that the pearls could be crushed with a pair of pliers, leaving the chain stitch and the embroidery threads uncut. The large pearls we removed by cutting the thread but most of the small pearls that lay in the seam allowances and close to the seam lines needed to be removed before stitching. It was a strangely gratifying thing to do, crushing pearls, but time consuming nonetheless.